Charmy Harikrishnan reviews My Beautiful Shadow by Radhika Jha

There was a time when Vincent van Gogh fell in love with Japanese art. Before his brush went on a dizzying swirl, dragging desperate yellows and mad indigoes across the canvas, he had watched and marvelled at Japanese woodblock prints. Like Utagawa Hiroshige's Sudden Shower Over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake (1857). A title that is as plain as it can be. But nothing about the work is. Black diagonal lines of rain fall on six-or are they seven?-crouching people on a bridge, rushing for shelter. A boatman rows against the current. You hear thunder at the back of your neck. One of the hallmarks of this art was that every figure had a black outline, to hold the luminous colour within. But as you look at Hiroshige's Shower, you see the fluidity of shapes, the fluency of lines. Typically Japanese, you might think. An astonishing mix of stillness and movement, like a Japanese garden. Stylistic but vibrant, like an act of Noh. But what if the contours become stifling? What if the lines close in on the colours and swallow them? Like in Radhika Jha's slim novel, where her characters do not escape their stiff outlines.

Jha has written three books earlier, including a collection of short stories, The Elephant and the Maruti, and the novel Smell.

Jha's new novel, A Beautiful Shadow, is of a Japanese woman who calls herself the true aesthete. Kayo is not after beautiful things. Yes, she wants a summer dress from Dior, those red Gucci high heels and that Dolce & Gabbana white clutch bag. It is not because they themselves are beautiful. It is because in the 1980s Japan, Kayo-chan discovers that these things make her beautiful. She is in the process of sculpting herself. She calls herself a member of the beauty lovers' club, "the biggest, best-kept secret of all of Tokyo's secrets". And what do these women do? "We do not covet beauty created by others. We want to create our own kind of beauty and do it on ourselves. We are the true aesthetes, for we carry our beauty on our bodies."

Jha picks an old trope: the plain girl and her beautiful friend, Kayo and Tomoko, and how the former diligently, disastrously transforms into the latter.

This is consumerist Japan, floating in money, living it up in the economic bubble of the late 1980s. The Japanese bought Hermes scarves and Louis Vuitton bags and then some more. This is Tokyo's gilded age. When her husband is at work and the children are away in school, Kayo would slip out of her not-too-big, difficult-toclean home, away from the cleaning liquids and the bento boxes that she packed her husband's lunch in.

Then she begins a fervid search for sales. Kayo is Japan with its shopping bags. Kayo is Japan which has discovered the American religion of Happyism and indulges in it with an unflagging devotion to department stores. "Hell was being without shops and family sales to go to." Kayo is Japan that overspends and overdrafts and goes into a dizzying spiral of debt.

Kayo is Japan that slides up to the yakuza to make money. This is, she says, the story of her club and her country. "This is the story of our shame."

However, Kayo does not hold your attention either as a character or as a metaphor for Japan. And until the very end, she is the only character that walks up and down the book, getting in and out of changing rooms, in her brown Louis Vuitton shoes.

You don't buy Kayo's need to binge. Jha's and Kayo's attempts to philosophise- clothes as the meaning of life, clothes giving happiness and signalling status- too sounds false and futile.

In this book crowded with details you get a glimpse of Japan sliding into the lost decade, but the embellishments are laid so thick that you cannot spot the plot or the character under the 800,000-yen kimono that glows like deep sea water. Perhaps, Jha should look up Hiroshige's Shower.

- Follow the writer on Twitter @charmyh

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